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Tag Archives: Gonorrhea

In a news release, the World Health Organization (WHO) has stated that antibiotic resistance is making gonorrhoea – a common sexually-transmitted infection – much harder, and sometimes impossible, to treat.

Background Information:

Gonorrhoea is a sexually transmitted disease that can infect the genitals, rectum, and throat.

There are no affordable, rapid, point-of-care diagnostic tests for gonorrhoea.

Many people who are infected with gonorrhoea do not have any symptoms, so they go undiagnosed and untreated. On the other hand, however, when patients do have symptoms, such as discharge from the urethra or the vagina, doctors often assume it is gonorrhoea and prescribe antibiotics – even though people may be suffering from another kind of infection.

The overall inappropriate use of antibiotics increases the development of antibiotic resistance in gonorrhoea as well as other bacterial diseases.

Key Messages:

Each year, an estimated 78 million people are infected with gonorrhoea:

widespread resistance to ciprofloxacin [97% of countries that reported data in that period found drug-resistant strains],

increasing resistance to azithromycin [81%], and

the emergence of resistance to the current last-resort treatment: the extended-spectrum cephalosporins (ESCs) oral cefixime or injectable ceftriaxone [66%].

Currently, in most countries, ESCs are the only single antibiotic that remain effective for treating gonorrhoea. But resistance to cefixime – and more rarely to ceftriaxone – has now been reported in more than 50 countries. As a result, WHO issued updated global treatment recommendations in 2016 advising doctors to give 2 antibiotics: ceftriaxone and azithromycin.

Development of new drugs

The development of new antibiotics is not very attractive for commercial pharmaceutical companies as

treatments are taken only for short periods of time (unlike medicines for chronic diseases) and

they become less effective as resistance develops,

meaning that the supply of new drugs constantly needs to be replenished.

There are only 3 new candidate drugs in various stages of clinical development:

solithromycin, for which a phase III trial has recently been completed;

zoliflodacin, which has completed a phase II trial; and

gepotidacin, which has also completed a phase II trial.

Gonorrhoea prevention

Gonorrhoea can be prevented through safer sexual behaviour, in particular consistent and correct condom use.